Retelling Stories

Yesterday, I hosted the latest session of my writing group, Wakefield Writers. We meet once a month on a Saturday afternoon in my favourite cafe in Wakefield. Choosing the tasks for these sessions can be a little intimidating, but yesterday turned out as well as the others. I decided to focus on retelling stories with two distinct sections – retelling your own story and retelling someone else’s.

The first task was to take an occurrence from your own life and embellish it a bit. I struggled, getting bogged down in the reality, and so did the other writers. However, when we moved onto the second task, they really came alive.

On a scrap of paper, all of us wrote down a small bullet list explaining an event in our own lives, along with a few emotions that we associated with it. Then we passed it along to the next person and wrote a small piece of prose or poetry based on these prompts from other people. It was much easier and we could all get into it more. Funnily enough, some of the resulting pieces had details in that the original storyteller could identify with, even though they hadn’t written the piece themselves. What we ended up with were a collection of interesting pieces to develop that were genuinely amusing in places and poignant in others.

Maybe the problem with ‘write what you know’ is that you know it too well. Sure, when we write we take the emotions generated by particular events and infuse our fiction with those, but trying to stick too rigidly to something because ‘that’s the way it happened’ is more of a task for memoir writers. For me, fiction is about letting loose and finding something new. That’s what happened in our writing group yesterday.

About Me

Welcome to my website and thanks for taking a look around. I’m Kit Eyre, a writer living in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Yes, I’ve used a pseudonym as my writer’s name, although not for the reasons you might think. Read More